Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson

I've been greatly anticipating Sinéad Gleeson's debut novel having read her powerful book of essays/memoir “Constellations” and the enlightening collections of stories by Irish women writers she edited “The Long Gaze Back” and “The Glass Shore”. Gleeson is highly attuned to the ways art, songs, writing and storytelling not only capture a place and the different personalities who inhabit it, but stand as a testimony for those whose narratives are often ignored, erased or suppressed. Therefore it's fitting this unique and captivating novel evokes the lives of a community and individuals who reside on the margins.

“Hagstone” follows artist Nell who resides on a remote rocky island. She's highly independent enjoying swims off the coast and occasionally takes lovers. Both she and the small populace there rely on the income from tourists who arrive during the warmer months. To make ends meet, she acts as a guide to these visitors who hunger for salacious stories of shipwrecks and tantalising folklore. So Nell is cognizant of the way true stories can become sensationalised. Her artwork reaches for a more subtle understanding and connection with the past. The pieces she creates are often meant to be ephemeral and work as touchstones to the lives of women who were maligned or misunderstood.

She receives an unexpected invitation to make a specially commissioned artwork for a reclusive commune known as the Iníons. This is a group formed of diverse women who have moved here from all over the world and, until now, their lives have been shrouded in secrecy. But Nell's presence isn't welcome by all who reside there. She gradually becomes familiar with several members and the uneasy structure of their commune in the lead up to a celebration – a climatic event with unintended consequences. A strange feature of the island is that there is a mysterious sound which emanates from the landscape and the Iníons have a reverence for it. Not everyone can hear this sound, but it drives some to madness and other to a kind of spiritual awakening or connection with this singular location.

This is a story which wrestles with the tension between independence and community. It asks what advantages can be found in building a life in relative isolation and what is sacrificed by removing oneself from the larger society: “Solitude can be its own kind of loss.” It especially focuses on the plight of women and those who understandably want to escape from the patriarchy. However, any group inevitably forms its own hierarchy and involves power struggles. The novel cleverly feels out the levels of compromise required when seeking to achieve a truly peaceful existence. It’s also fascinating how it explores the relationship between artist and subject. In what ways does art memorialise the lives of others and how does it intrude upon their privacy? Nick, a famous actor visiting the island, seeks to make a film about the Iníons and becomes another suspicious presence in this commune. Tensions mount from both inside and outside this community resulting is a horrific clash.

I deeply connected with this novel's story and appreciate the complex way it engages with these issues while also delivering a highly entertaining, compellingly gothic, occasionally sexy and meaningful tale.

Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson

In this group of memoirist essays art and life intersect to create a powerfully moving portrait of cultural and personal change. It feels like this book has been a long time coming and in later essays Sinéad Gleeson refers to its gradual creation as well as obstacles which sharpened its focus. I’ve been familiar with Gleeson’s work as a journalist and a curator since she edited two stunning anthologies of Irish short fiction by women: “The Long Gaze Back” and “The Glass Shore”. So I was already familiar with her stance as a feminist and aesthete, but it wasn’t till reading this gripping and mesmerising book that I understood how her personal history partly informs her conversation with literature and the arts. The essays roughly follow the trajectory of her life from childhood to adulthood and the severely challenging medical issues she’s faced along the way. These health issues presented many heartrending and difficult obstacles, but they also gave Gleeson a unique perspective of the world around her as a woman, citizen, friend, mother and intellectual. She charts how her beliefs and feelings have evolved alongside the society around her. Certainly she’s lived through many personal challenges, but she’s never let them define her. Rather, they’ve inspired a deeper form of engagement with the world and fervent belief that “Art is about interpreting our own experience.”

I read these essays in chronological order and, while they would certainly be just as impactful read in isolation, it’s touching following her journey from a childhood as a devote Catholic visiting Lourdes hoping for a miracle cure to an adult political activist canvassing from door to door to help overturn Ireland’s abortion ban. We see different angles of her experiences with illness such as a rare disorder that caused her bones to deteriorate and later battles with cancer. She also recounts how her past illnesses created complications for her pregnancies. Her many visits to the hospital inform her ontological understanding of the body as a physical and social being. She perceives how “The pregnant body is not solely its owner’s domain. In gestating another person you become public property. The world – doctors, friendly neighbours, women in shop queues – feels entitled to an opinion on it.” Her experiences with doctors and legislation involving the body sharpen her resolve about the importance of individual autonomy and respecting what a person wants and needs.

There are also many very perceptive assessments of the work of numerous visual and performance artists as well as writers. Gleeson poignantly reflects on her personal connection to their themes and subject matter. For instance, she describes how she’s moved by the work of Frida Kahlo as someone whose body was similarly physically restricted through medical procedures. She notes how “Immobility is gasoline for the imagination: in convalescence, the mind craves open spaces, dark alleys, moon landings.” Gleeson seeks out artists who meaningfully frame their experiences in a way that broaden the political conversation and offer moments of personal solace. The essay 'The Adventure Narrative' also honours cavalier women who have set out to explore the world since this is traditionally seen as a masculine activity – as explored in Abi Andrews’ novel “The Word for Woman is Wilderness”. But, aside from noteworthy female explorers and impactful women artists, Gleeson also chronicles the experience of women who have been left out of the history books such as in the essay 'Second Mother' where she memorializes the life of a great woman who inspired her passion for reading.

I was utterly entranced by this book. It’s incredibly brave to write so openly about such personal subject matter. In writing so thoughtfully about her life Gleeson compellingly explores many larger ideas and issues, showing how they connect to a shared sense of culture and society. For all the heartache and struggle these essays cover, this is also a wonderfully optimistic and uplifting book that ought to be treasured.

The Glass Shore edited by Sinéad Gleeson

Over my winter holiday last year I read the anthology “The Long Gaze Back” and was enraptured by the quality of writing included. This book helped me discover writers such as Lisa McInerney, Maeve Brennan, Anakana Schofield and Lucy Caldwell whose books I’ve gone on to read and enjoy over the course of this year. But, as well as being a group of engaging stories in themselves, this anthology served as a self conscious attempt to give a necessary platform to Irish women writers in a canon dominated by male voices. Editor Sinéad Gleeson has now brought together a second volume “The Glass Shore” which only includes women writers from the North of Ireland. It’s a diverse array of fascinating short stories from over two centuries of writing that represent a plethora of authors from this region. It was wonderful reading this anthology from start to finish as I was treated to a wide variety of excellent stories with varying styles and subject matter. But I also gained a sense of the progressing ideas and issues female writers from Northern Ireland have dealt with in their fiction over time. The act of reading the stories in “The Glass Shore” together builds a cumulative mental portrait of this country from a variety of strong female points of view.

A beautiful arch is created from the first story to the last. The book begins with a fable-like story 'The Mystery of Ora' by Rosa Mulholland where a traveller comes upon a remote house with an astronomer who keeps a beautiful woman confined there. In the exuberantly enjoyable final story of the collection by Roisín O'Donnell there is also a spark of the supernatural; 'The Seventh Man' is about a woman who weds men over the centuries to sap them of their energy to keep herself alive. It’s a fitting way to end this collection which includes many female characters that demonstration inventive ways of eluding society’s conventional expectations for how women should live. In ‘An Idealist’ by Erminda Renoult Esler a woman recalls an incident in her life when she was sharply belittled by her sister only to grow to become a respected writer. Margaret Barrington’s majestic story ‘Village without Men…’ is a complex depiction of a community of women who have lost all their men to a ship wreck leading them to carry on entirely independently. Whereas 'The Devil's Gift' by Frances Molloy presents a girl from a large family who tries to join a nunnery but finds this community of women far from welcoming. By contrast, Lucy Caldwell’s heart-wrenching story ‘Mayday’ is told from the point of view of a girl at university trying to illegally deal with an unwanted pregnancy. When she contemplates the responsibility of the man who got her pregnant she reasons “It should be his problem too, but it just isn't, the world doesn't work like that.” Considering that the issue of abortion in Northern Ireland has been hotly debated in recent times, the story of this young woman’s precarious state feels especially relevant.

There are a large amount of vivid female characters in the stories, but there are also several stories narrated by male characters and consider many different aspects of masculinity. Ethna Carbery’s creepy and emotionally-compelling ‘The Coming of Maire Ban’ shows a man on All Soul’s Night hoping for a visit from his wife who died in childbirth. He’s accompanied by a friend who also loved his wife and through the night he comes to a realization about the reality of their relationship. Caroline Blackwood’s alternately hilarious and tragic story ‘Taft’s Wife’ is written from the point of view of a male social worker reuniting society woman Mrs Ripstone with the boy who she gave up for adoption. He remarks that “She had an unpleasantly over-ladylike accent that masked some coarser, underlying accent with unmelodious results.” Mrs Ripstone's increasingly flirtatious/superficial manner with him and dismissal of her son conceals the way she’s felt compelled to construct an identity and life which doesn’t include the reality of her child. ‘The Girls’ by Janet McNeill focuses on the views of a man taken to a tedious dinner reuniting his wife with her old friends and the way this forms a communion with our past and present selves. Sheila Llewellyn’s 'Capering Penguins' sees its male narrator return from war to visit the bookshop whose titles have an entirely different meaning for him now that he’s experienced the bitter consequences of battle. This creates a crisis within him which drives him to take shocking action.

Political conflict enters into the narratives much more as the stories progress through time and the bitter consequences of The Troubles affect the writers and their characters. Mary Beckett’s enigmatic story ‘Flags and Emblems’ shows the power of symbols in a community with sharp Unionist/Loyalist divides. The tense mood is so pervasive it feels like it influences the physical environment itself as in this poetic line: “The distant, lipping whisper on the sand and the sucking puffs of little breezes from the hills taunted her with their lack of violence.” There is a different slant taken on symbols in 'Cornucopia' by Anne Devlin where her narrator becomes a scholar working in Germany far from her Irish roots. The main character of Linda Anderson’s evocative story 'The Turn' has also left her homeland and is now confined in a Cambridge hospital. She thinks bitterly of Northern Ireland that it is “A fragment of a country, a blood-soaked tatter of a place with its 'peace walls' still standing, more than fifteen years after the ceasefires.” The couple in Jan Carson’s ‘Settling’ feel similarly disillusioned with available opportunities in Belfast and move to England, but the narrator eerily finds that the presence of her deceased grandmother has travelled with her.

Evelyn Conlon’s powerful 'Disturbing Words' gives an impression of the practical reality of new physical borders and individual resistance to regimental change. This is something which will no doubt be newly felt in Northern Ireland over the coming years as the government sorts out the mess of Brexit with its new borders. An act of individual protest also occurs in ‘The Mural Painter’ by Rosemary Jenkinson where a man commissioned to spray paint a mural for Armistice Day creates something entirely different from what his paramilitary employers want. Annemarie Neary presents social/political clashes abroad in her story ‘The Negotiators’ where a woman seeks capitalist opportunities in Algiers but isn’t prepared for the realities of the rapidly transforming playing field. An example of the more subtle long-lasting consequences of political conflict is shown in ‘No Other Place’ by Martina Devlin where an aging poet’s opinions clash with a police constable. Here you can feel a writer’s frustration with her work not being read, but she comes to the practical conclusion that “Perhaps it’s irrelevant if they listen or not – maybe what matters is the act of writing.” Luckily this anthology brings together this rich variety of writing to give a complex personal understanding of political turbulence within Northern Ireland.

While there are many interesting issues explored, I also highly admire the technical innovation and experimentation of form demonstrated in many of these stories as well. Polly Devlin gives a realistic take on a mythological story in her ‘The Countess & Icarus’ with tragic-comic results and some cracking lines such as “Martine’s crust now remained intact as far as Dora knew, but presumably had, once upon a time, yielded and oozed nicely for Victor.” Una Woods shows absurdist flair in her fascinating story 'The Diary: An Everyday Fable' which includes intense conversations about the purpose for being between metal objects. ‘The Cure for Too Much Feeling’ by Bernie McGill makes a woman’s lack of empathy into a medical condition where “She was laid low by other people’s misery, it sapped her energy, brought her out in a rash.” It forces her to become increasingly confined and cut off from society until she’s entirely isolated. The emotionally devastating story ‘The Speaking and the Dead’ by Tara West plays upon popular emotional and financial investments people make in the supernatural to deal with un-reconciled feelings of loss and grief. Many stories in the collection show highly creative ways for conveying complex ideas and emotions through forms of writing uniquely tailored to suit their subject matter.

I’m excited to read more from many writers included in “The Glass Shore”. Many of the contemporary writers included have novels and collections of stories published. It will also be thrilling to track down the books of some of the lesser known deceased writers in this book. I currently have on my shelves book published this year by Roisín O'Donnell and Annemarie Neary and I’ve been browsing through books by many more of the authors included. This anthology certainly stands on its own, but makes the most wonderful starting point for discovering writers I haven’t encountered before. While each story stands on its own, there is an intelligent flow from story to story which touch upon connected ideas, concepts or themes. The care and passion Sinéad Gleeson has shown in compiling this collection and the previous anthology is commendable. “The Glass Shore” is a necessary celebration of great women writers.

The Long Gaze Back edited by Sinéad Gleeson

What a thrill that a new anthology has been published that is entirely dedicated to Irish women writers! Over the past two years I've become particularly enthralled by Irish writing and much of it has been written by women such as Anne Enright, Mary Costello, Edna O'Brien, Eimear McBride, Audrey Magee, Sara Baume, Belinda McKeon and Liz Nugent (some of these authors are included in this anthology). While I've also read many fantastic books written by Irish men it's sadly unsurprising that looking over many anthologies of short stories from Ireland (and around the world) that the authors included are “heavily weighted towards male writers” - as editor Sinéad Gleeson notes in her introduction. “The Long Gaze Back” is a necessary correction giving a platform to the huge diversity of writing by Irish women over time. Even if the literary cannon hasn't always included them and some of these authors' books have gone out of print, this anthology proves that these voices have always been there.

As the title suggests, it's an anthology focused on looking back at a rich and varied literary history giving a sampling of stories that encompass a range of themes and writing styles. The first writer included was born in 1786 and the last story is by a writer born in 1986. This offers a fascinating oversight to how the tone and subject matter of fiction has changed over two centuries. Although the language and themes have evolved radically over this time, the emphatic sense each story gives that the author has something important to say has not.

There are also surprising parallels that can be drawn. For instance, a parable by Maria Edgeworth written in the early 1800s about the way appearances can be deceiving when impulsively buying something is echoed in contemporary writer Belinda McKeon's sentiment about online behaviour and internet purchases: “There is always, sunk into those pages, the feeling that an ordered, layered, perfectly furnished life is within reach; that the clicks will bring into being a settling experience, a fitting of everything needed and everything already, awkwardly in possession into their rightful slots.” Another story by Mary Lavin shows how a widowed woman maintains her independence fending off the advances of a man who comes calling while Eimear Ryan tells a story of a widow who deals with her grief by actively seeking men out. The farcical and hilarious story of a man's extended train journey with a salmon by writing-team cousins Somerville and Ross is echoed in Lisa McInerney's tragicomic and explicit tale of a man's drug-fuelled night out. The intense feeling for the loss of an infant child in Maeve Brennan's brilliant story is given a different slant in Lucy Caldwell's beautifully-descriptive and cleverly-structured story of the tense and precarious early days in the life of a newborn. Viewing this wide range of short stories as a group gives a special insight into how similar ideas can be approached from different ways that are more meaningful for the time in which they are written.

Some of the stories deliver suspense and tremendously climactic scenes such as a tale by Elizabeth Bowen about the return of an old lover or Nuala Ní Chonchúir's story of sisterhood between women at odds with each other in a time of great need. Other stories focus on quiet moments of reflection as in Siobhán Mannion's story of a woman stealing privacy in a morning swim or Evelyn Conlon's story of a sister she believes to be lost in Australia. Some of this fiction such as the urgent and impactful 'Beneath the Taps: A Testimonial' by Anakana Schofield shows a tremendously inventive style of writing that breaks boundaries for how a story can be related. There are fantastic moments of quiet transgression in stories by Mary Costello about a woman who steals her neighbour's dog that is being abused and Kate O'Brien about a woman touring Italy who receives an emphatic and spontaneous proposition for an alternative life from a stranger. Stories by Roisín O'Donnell and E.M. Reapy hint at the process of change in Ireland, the coming and going from other countires creating national and racial diversity in the country's culture. And this wouldn't be a proper Irish book without a good deal of mulling over death such as the story by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne where a woman tends a grave or Bernie McGill's tale of how a family emotionally deals with a funeral or Niamh Boyce who invokes a voice from beyond.

I really enjoyed taking my time reading this entire anthology over a long period of time and I'd suggest you do the same. These are stories to be savoured and enjoyed. They invite you to seek out more work by these talented authors as each story is proceeded by a biographical brief that lists the authors' other publications. And I do now feel compelled to read much more by these writers. It's somehow reassuring that the voices in stories by authors I've read before like Eimear McBride and Anne Enright are most assuredly from those writers, but their technique and subject range prove to be dramatically different in this new work. Other stories by authors I haven't read before like Maeve Brennan and Christine Dwyer Hickey hit me like a slap making me wonder why I've never encountered their writing before. This is an anthology with many different points that you can spring off from, but it's also an important book with tremendous scope to be savoured by itself.